Tally's Electric Theatre

The following is from an article that I read on Thomas L. Tally:

"Tally discovered, it was not going to be easy to assemble an audience for moving pictures. Projectors were difficult to run and impossible to repair; the electrical current or batteries they ran on seldom worked properly; and the films were expensive, of poor quality, and few. But most important, customers balked at entering darkened rooms to see a few minutes of moving pictures.

Unable to lure customers into his "theater," Tally did the next best thing. He punched holes in the partition separating the larger storefront from the Vitascope room and invited customers to "peer in at the screen while standing in the comfortable security of the well lighted phonograph parlor. Three peep holes were at chair level for seated spectators, and four somewhat higher for standees —standing room only after three admissions, total capacity seven. Regular admission was five cents, but the price per peep hole was fifteen cents".

Tally also ran Tally's New Broadway Theatre (428 South Broadway), another Tally’s Electric Theatre (262 South Main Street; both in Los Angeles), and Tally's Theatre (904 State Street) in Santa Barbara.

The Tally's Electric Theatre was the first movie 'Theatre' in the United States. I believe the World's first was in 1896 in Paris. it was called George Melies' Theatre.

I will be in Los Angeles in January. Does anyone know if this theater buikding still exists and if it does, what it is now?
I would love to drive by when I am there, but wont bother unless there is srill something there. It looks like it is just south of the 101, and just west of the 101's intersection with the 5. I don't know if I was in that part of LA when I was there a few years ago, but do know the general area there.

I found a listing for an eye doctor located at that address.
Milton H. Hillman, MD Ophthalmologist
311 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, California (CA) 90013

I don't know if his office is the only building there or part of a larger complex.

Thanks. Unfortunately, it could be a new building (new being any building after the theater vacated). I guess I'll have to drive by and see.

The Broadway Theatre in the 400 block was called Tally's "New" Broadway, because he had an earlier Tally's Broadway Theater in the 800 block. That theater was demolished in 1929, to make way for an expansion of the May Company Department Store.

Bway:

I checked the location with Terraserver, and found my memory of the area confirmed The site if the theater is now occupied by a large office building (probably built in the 1920s.) The server won't recognize the address 311 S.Spring, but does fetch 315. The building occupies the entire corner of the block, all the way to 3rd Street. There are very few small buildings from before the 1920s era left on Spring Street, which was for decades the main financial district of Los Angeles, lined mainly with banks and corporate offices, and a few hotels. Most of the banks and corporate headquarters have departed these buildings, but it is still a splendid collection of mostly 1920s-1930s architecture, though much of it lies vacant.

From the LA Library, circa 1896:

http://jpg2.lapl.org/theater2/00015465.jpg

Thomas Tally's Spring Street location was not the first theatre especially built for movies. As can be seen from the picture linked in the comment above by ken mc, this was the location of Tally's Phonograph Parlor, which was a storefront arcade containing phonographs and primitive viewing machines through which an individual viewer could see "moving pictures" produced by means of a device which flipped through a series of still photographs on cards.

The room at the back was "Tally's Theatre" which he opened in 1896, following the great success of the first exhibition of movies in Los Angeles, at the Orpheum Theatre (the Grand, on Main Street) earlier that year. Here is a quote from David Nasaw's article on the early history of motion picture exhibition, published in the November, 1993 issue of American Heritage Magazine:

"After two weeks of sold-out performances, the projector and its operators left the Orpheum for a tour of nearby vaudeville houses. But it turned out that theaters outside Los Angeles could not provide the electrical power needed to run the projector, so the machine was hauled back to Los Angeles and installed in the back of Thomas Tally’s amusement parlor.

"In the front of his store, Tally had set up automatic phonograph and peepshow machines that provided customers, for a nickel a play, with a few minutes of scratchy recorded sound or a few seconds of flickering moving images. Tally now partitioned off the back of his parlor for a 'vitascope' room."

It was Tally's Electric Theatre at 262 South Main Street which was opened in 1902, and was the first permanent theatre in America built especially for the exhibition of movies. It proved not to be as permanent as Tally had hoped, though. The venture was a financial failure and, after six months of showing movies, Tally converted the house into a Vaudeville theatre.

A comment above suggests that the first movie theatre in the world was opened by George Melies in Paris, in 1896. In fact, Melies theatre (named Theatre Robert-Houdin), which he acquired in 1888, was a live performance venue, specializing in magic acts. Melies added movies to his programs in 1896, but continued to present the magic shows as well. Theatre Robert-Houdin, therefore, would not qualify as an actual movie theatre, any more than would the many Vaudeville houses and other theatres in the United States which began including early movies as part of their programs about the same time Melies did.

Here is a page about Melies and his early work in the development of movies.

When Tally's Electric changed it's name to the Lyric at 262 south Main, was it opened as a vaudeville house? Here's something from Oct. 11, 1903, but it sounds like the 'moving pictures' were more of a special show than the regular fare:

A set of moving pictures called "Fairyland," shown at the Lyric Theater in this city now, is an interesting exhibit of the limits to which moving picture-making can be carried in the hands of experts equipped with time and money to carry out their devices.......T.L. Tally, manager of the Lyric, claims to have the only film of its kind in the West.

vokoban: My source for the information about Tally converting his Main Street theatre to vaudeville after six months is the American Heritage article by David Nasaw, to which I linked in my comment above. This was apparently not uncommon in the early days of movie theatres. Before 1905, there wasn't much product available, and the novelty of the short reels of scenes and tableaux and random events which were then available soon wore off.

It wasn't until movie producers began making comedy, drama and adventure films with at least rudimentary plots that theatres specializing in movies became financially successful. Of course, the vaudeville theatres themselves frequently ran films in those years, but they were not the main attraction. Tally was obviously persistent, though, so he probably exhibited movies in his theatre whenever there was something available that he thought would draw patrons.

It's interesting that Tally changed the name of his theatre to the Lyric. It's certainly a more fitting name for a vaudeville house than Electric Theatre would have been- and, if the name "TALLY'S ELECTRIC" was spelled out in capital letters, "LYRIC" was easily (and cheaply) made from the letters he already had.

That's a great observation about the letter reuse! I've seen businesses do that today.

The Electric Theater was mentioned in yesterday's LA Times article about the decline of theaters in downtown Los Angeles.

Does the building still exist?

I don't know if the Lyric theater mentioned in a 1904 article is about this theater or not, but it gives you an idea of what some politicians in L.A. thought of motion picture theaters at that time.

Los Angeles Examiner, January 5, 1904

NOT IN FAVOR OF ELECTRIC SHOWS

"City Tax Collector Johnson and City Attorney Mathews presented to the Council yesterday an amendment to the city ordinance regarding theaters. . . .

The amendment . . . referred especially the theaters which produce only electric attractions, such as the Lyric, where the show is confined to motion pictures and talking machines.

. . . it was found that the gramophone and kinetoscope parlors were in bad favor with the Councilmen.

“Those places are a disgrace to the city,” said Councilman Davenport . . . . “Those pictures may not be indecent, but they are suggestive, which is worse, and they should not be allowed to run in the city. . . . ”.

I took a hike down Spring Street today. Status should be closed/demolished. There's no evidence of any turn of the century buildings on this block.

Does anyone know the Cinema Treasures page for the original Tally's Electric at 262 s. Main? I put together a few graphics to show the actual location using a 1906 Sanborn map and a current satellite image. Here they are even though they don't refer to the Spring street address:

This is a side by side comparison:
http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=488754120&size=o
This is an overlay version:
http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=488754124&context=photostream&size=o

Tally's Electric on Main Street doesn't yet have a listing at Cinema Treasures. But there is what I'm pretty sure is a picture of it when it was called the Liberty Theatre. That page gives the Liberty's address as 136 S. Main, but the photo on the page depicts a building which can be seen at the east end of 3rd street in some other old photos of the area. The Liberty name must have belonged to more than one theatre at various times. See my recent comment on that page for the explanation of why I think the picture may depict Tally's Electric Theatre some time after he left Main Street.

vokoban: I just checked your Flickr posts and it certainly looks as though the surviving building on Main Street at what is now the corner of 3rd could be the Liberty Theatre (and thus maybe Tally's Electric), minus its front section. It's the right size and shape, and looks as though it's in the right location. The building depicted as the Liberty is either that one or was the vanished building immediately south of it.

Again, I've checked the two photos of the Liberty at Brent Dickerson's page and I'm now quite sure that the truncated corner building still standing at the northeast corner 3rd and Main is at least on what's left of the lot once occupied by the Liberty Theatre, and may be the same building. A hidden landmark!

There were two Liberty Theatre's, one located at 266 S. Main Street which operated from the early part of the 20th Century until pre-1930 (which is the photograph incorrectly placed on the the 'other' Liberty Theatre-its final name (aka Novelty Theatre & Chinese Theatre), 136 S. Main Street which operated from at least the 1930's until the 1950's.

Wait. If the room labeled "Theatre" in your Sanborn map is definitely 262 S. Main, then the Liberty and Tally's Electric were not the same theatre. The Liberty would have been a bit farther south than Tally's Electric. As can be seen by comparing map with old and new photos, the Liberty Theatre building backed (and backs?) up to the side wall of the Hotel Bisbee (aka Hotel Manhattan) on 3rd Street, but the room labeled "Theatre" on your map is a bit farther north than that. So there were two theatres on that section of that block of Main Street. Puzzling.

KenRoe: Then we've definitely got two different theatres in this short stretch of Main Street; Tally's Electric (later called the Lyric) at 262 S. Main and the Liberty at 266 S. Main. That means we're still in need of a photo of the Main Street Tally's/Lyric (and both theatres still need their own CT pages, too.)

It's hard to tell from the photos, but after looking at my large images in photoshop on my computer, the 262 address is a parking lot now. The building on the corner of 3rd is apparently the same building but was sliced diagonally to let 3rd flow through when they took the corner off. Unless they built a new building with the exact same footprint minus the diagonal slice it must be the same building since it lines up perfectly with the current photo. The remaining building north a little is getting ready for the wrecking ball from what a few business owners on Main have told me. That will mean that the Cathedral and the 3rd corner building are the only remaining buildings on the whole east side of Main block. The 266 address on the Sanborn map is actually the corner building now which I believe has a 3rd street address now but I'm not positive. If anyone wants a similar overlay of another block or area, let me know.

KenRoe: Thanks for the two addresses for the Liberty. 266 S. Main clears up the puzzle. So vokoban's Sanborn map shows the location of Tally's Electric, and the Liberty was just a couple of doors south of it. I was hoping the Liberty building would turn out to have been Tally's, as it would have made a spectacular first movie theatre. But at least now we know just where to look in old pictures of Main Street for evidence of Tally's Electric.

Maybe if we look for photos of Vibiana's, Tally's might show up in the photo by chance.

This theatre opened as 'Tally's Phonograph and Vitascope Parlour', 311 S. Spring Street in 1896. The room at the rear allowed the audience to 'Hear New York Stage Song Hits' and 'See Living Pictures' projected on a screen. Adverts proclaimed it as America's first 'All Picture Theatre'.

It was such a success that in 1900 it moved to larger quarters at 338 S. Spring Street. One of these locations (311 or 388, I don't know which?) was the Ramona Hotel and Tally's Phonograph and Bioscope Parlour was located on the ground floor, to the left hand side of the hotel entrance.

In April 1902 Thomas L. Tally built his Electric Theatre (the first purpose-built for movies theatre in America) which was located at 262 S. Main Street. Tally renamed this the Lyric Theatre in 1904 and by 1910 it was known as Glockner's Automatic Theatre. I have added it under that name here....
http://cinematreasures.org/theater/19875/

The Electric Theater definitely needs its own CT page, especially if it was the first real movie theater. From the original advertisements it seems as though it was just called 'Electric Theater' minus the Tally's name. Here is an advertisement from 1902 and also a portion of an article about it from 1927:

This is listed under 'Amusements And Entertainments', not even under the 'Theaters' section of the same page:

(April 19, 1902)
ELECTRIC THEATER-262 SOUTH MAIN, OPP. THIRD ST.
Tonight-See the CAPTURE OF THE BIDDLE BROTHERS, one of the most exciting and realistic Moving Pictures ever shown to the public. A regular VAUDEVILLE of moving pictures, lasting one hour, for TEN CENTS. Continous Permormance 7:30 to 10:30 p.m.
MATINEE TODAY AT 3 P.M.

(Jan. 9, 1927)
WHEN CINEMA WAS YOUNG
BY KATHERINE LIPKE
One of the major milestones in the history of motion-picture development occurred at 262 South Main street, Los Angeles, in the year of 1902. Thomas L. Tally, former owner of a peep show, started a picture theater the first in existence and commenced showing one-reel masterpieces such as "Rescued by Rover," "The Burglar on the Roof," "The Life of an American Fireman" and "The Great Train Robbery." This incident is one of hundreds recorded in the fascinating and dramatic complication by Terry Ramsaye called "A Million and One Nights, a History of the Motion Picture." Mr. Ramsaye's work is in two volumes and goes back to the origin of the motion-picture and brings it along its dramatic and varied way up to the present moment. Interesting especially to us of the West is the steadily growing part California played in this development from that time in 1902 when Mr. Tally put up his sign-"Electric Theater-10 cents admission-children 5 cents."

Maybe it only had a one year run. There are continuous 'Electric Theater' advertisements up until June 15, 1903 and then it changes to the Lyric Theater:

(July 16, 1903)
LYRIC THEATER-262 South Main St.-
Opens Saturday, July 18th.
Refined Vaudeville.....New Moving Pictures.
Continuous Performance. Admission 10 Cents.

I color coded that comparison to show what, at least I believe, are original buildings on this square block.

http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=490063985&size=o

There was a fire on 9/16/96, according to the LA Times:

A COSTLY BLAZE.
PHONOGRAPH PARLORS BADLY SCORCHED LAST EVENING. The Fire was Caused by an Electric-light Wife--Vitascope Damaged and Valuable pictures Destroyed.

Fire in Tally's phonograph parior at No. 311 South Spring street last night did damage to the amount of several thousand dollars in less than a quarter of an Hour.

Ken mc...was the date on the last article supposed to be 1906? Or 1896?

Perhaps there is a problem here about the definition of "theater."

Clearly, there were two dedicated motion picture theaters in existance in 1896.

One in New Orleans opened May 1896, the other in Buffalo, New York opened October 1896.

The first was a building converted specially to show ONLY movies, the second was a theater CONSTRUCTED to show ONLY movies.

This is so many years before Tally's theater, that one might successfully claim that Tally built the first movie theater in Califnornia, but not in the United States.

That's why I was confused. There are so many books and sites that say it was Tally's, some of them pretty reliable. But 1896 would predate Tally's.

The problem is not with the definition of the word "theatre", but with the use of the word "Building." Edison's Vitascope Theater in Buffalo, also known as Edisonia Hall, was built in the basement of the Ellicott Square Building building (an immense office and commercial block containing 500,000 square feet, completed in 1896), and was apparently the first commercial use of that basement, but the theatre was not part of the building's original plans. That's why all those reliable books don't consider it the first building built especially to show movies. In fact there were many movie theatres-- probably dozens-- opened between 1896 and 1902 in spaces tucked into existing buildings, but Tally's Electric Theatre on Main Street remains the first permanent building in the world known to have been built from the ground up with the intention of using it to house a movie theatre.

The Vitascope Theatre in Buffalo is significant, not only for being one of the first successful movie theatres in the world (it continued in operation for more than a year), but for being the first movie theatre operated by Mitchell Mark who, with his brother Moe, eventually operated dozens of theatres, including their flagship house, the Mark Strand Theatre on Broadway in New York.

Another interesting fact about Buffalo's Vitascope Theatre is that, Like Thomas Tally's Spring Street operation of 1896, it was paired with a phonograph parlor. Wikipedia displays an old advertisement for it. However, the buildings which housed Tally's theatres, both the 1896 Spring Street operation at the back of his phonograph parlor and the 1902 Main Street operation in its purpose-built building, have been demolished, while Buffalo's Ellicott Square Building still exists, so it's still possible to get a good look at the storefront which housed Mark's phonograph parlor, and (if the building's owners will allow it) the basement space which housed his Vitascope Theatre.

So far, neither the Vitascope Theatre in Buffalo nor Vitascope Hall in New Orleans has been listed at Cinema Treasures.

The date of the LA Times article was September 16, 1896.

Vitascope Hall Buffalo, New York

http://cinematreasures.org/theater/20853/

Does the Electric Theater at 212 N. Main figure into any of this? Does it have a page here?

I just wondered because I can't find anything on CT about it but it seems to have been around for a long time. It shows up in these city directories:

[1915, 1916, 1920, 1923 LAT, 1930, 1936]

The Electric Theatre at 212 N. Main is listed here as the Roosevelt Theatre, which was apparently the last name under which it operated. I don't know if Thomas Tally had anything to do with it.

Thanks

Sorry to post this here, but we've tried every other way to reach Joe Vogel. Mr. V... if you read this, could you write to us at
BuffaloFilmFestival AT gmail.com ? (substitute @ for AT) Thank you!

New research has just revealed that Tally's Electric Theatre was NOT a free standing building: it was part of a larger building. Apparently, it was not a store-front conversion, but a purpose-built storefront.

This now leaves in doubt what the actual first "Theater" built free-standing from the ground up was.

Buffalo International Film Festival -

Could you direct us to this new research? I'd be interested to see it... Have any pictures surfaced?

The Spring St. address is definitely incorrect. 311 South Spring Street is the address of Tally's Phonograph Parlour, where Edison Kinetoscopes were indeed projected. But the Electric was first opened in 1902 on So. Main St. A picture of a theater identified as the Liberty Theater may be the same building, though this site gives that address as 266 So. Main. In any event, an advertisement on the front page of the LA Times, Saturday May 10, 1902 reads:
"ELECTRIC THEATER - 262 SOUTH MAIN, OPPOSITE THIRD ST.
Capture of the Biddle Brothers
NEW YORK CITY IN A BLIZZARD, THE HINDOO FAKIR and many other interesting scenes.
A REFINED Entertainment for
Ladies and Children
LASTING ONE HOUR FOR Ten Cents.
Continuous Performance 7:30 to 10:30 p.m.
T.L. Tally, Mgr.
Phone John 7191"